Desolation Road (19 page)

Then the rain-music began.

Sandwhisperwindwhisperblowtheredduneface, carryanddropcarryanddrop, the granular march of the desert verbed in a risingswirlingeddying, devildrivingstone-shaping all things come from sand and to sand they return,
said the red guitar,
listen to the voice-of-the-sand, listen to the wind, the voice of the lion, the wind from around the shoulder of the world, cloudcarrying jetstreamingliftingfalling, airy barometric layers of occluded fronts spiraldepressions: element of zones and boundaries while yet boundaryless, shifting frontiers of the mutable kingdoms of air howling their path roundandround and round the roundroundglobe:
the guitar sang the song of the air and the sand,
now sing the song of light and heat: of shafts and planes and the geometrical precision of their intersections, domain of perpetualperpendiculars, shafts of light, shields of heat, solid suffocation of desert carpets and breadovens, the silver eyebrows of the sun raised quizzically over the veiling clouds' dark perimeter: this is the song of the light, this is the song of the heat, yet there are still songs to be sung, said the guitar, before rain can fallfallfall and the song of the clouds is one of these, song of pillowfleecycottoncandyhighwispy exhalations of steamtrains and saucepans and bathrooms on winter mornings whipped by the wind and sent sailingscudding slipping in white armadas across a blueblueblue sea; and hear also the voice of the water drawn into the air, riverrundippledappleonwardflowingemptiedtrickles multiplying into streamsbrookstributariesrivers into thesea thesea! where shafts of light and heat move upon it like God's fingers and the wind draws it upup up into the realm of barometric boundaries where the sea is shaped into chords of StratusMajor and CirrusMinor and AugmentedCumulus:
there were songs to each of these things, and a music that was the name people gave them in their hearts, hidden like the harmonies in the strings of a guitar. These songs were the true names of things, spoken by the soul, so easily buried under the little busynesses of everyman everyday.

The music raged into the sky like an elemental thing. It threw itself with a roar and a howl at the walls of the clouds: wild and unbounded, growing and growing until it burst the bounds of human understanding into the place beyond understanding, where the true names are. The guitar cried for release. The clouds fretted at their tight constriction. Time strained at twelve minutes of twelve but the song would not let them go, any of them. Reflected images of insanity flickered across The Hand's suit of white picturecloth. The children hid themselves under the flaps of Rael Mandella's desert coat. The world could not take very much more truth.

Then a raindrop fell. It ran down the flank of the derelict space-explorer and made a dark splash on the sand. Another joined it. Then another. Then another and another and another and another and suddenly it was raining.

The rain song ended. The acappella voice of the rain filled all the earth. The children held out disbelieving hands to catch the heavy drops. Then the clouds burst open and one hundred and fifty thousand years hurled itself to the ground. Rael Mandella, blind and gasping, the wind driven from his lungs, sought the terrified children and hid them under his coat. The sky emptied itself on the huddled, miserable pile of people.

Concentric walls of water swept out from the secret heart of the desert. At the high place called Desolation Point the Babooshka and Grandfather Haran had prepared a private siesta-time picnic. The rain transformed it into a rout. Pathetic in drenched taffeta, the Babooshka dazedly stuffed plates and rugs into a wicker hamper rapidly filling with water. Torrents of red water poured into every home and swept away carpets, chairs, tables, and loose sundries. The people were astonished. Then they heard the drumming on the roof tiles and they all shouted, "Rain, rain, rain!" and rushed out into the lanes and alleys to turn their faces to the sky and let the rain wash the dry years out of them.

The rain rained as it had never rained before. Red rivers coursed down the narrow alleyways, a small but spectacular waterfall leaped over the bluffs, the irrigation channels in the gardens swelled into torrents of thick brown chocolaty loam studded with uprooted seedings and vegetables. Everything leaped and hissed under the deluge. The rain punished Desolation Road.

The people did not care. It was rain: rain! Water from the sky, the end of the drought that had gripped their desert land for one hundred and fifty thousand years. The people looked at the town. They looked at the rain. It was so heavy they could barely see the relay beacon light on top of Dr. Alimantando's house. They looked at one another, clothing clinging to their bodies, hair plastered to their heads, faces streaked with red mud. Someone laughed, a little ridiculous laugh that grew and grew and grew until it was a great guffawing belly laugh. Someone else caught the laugh, then someone else and someone else, and in a moment everyone was laughing, wonderful good good laughter. They threw off their clothes and ran naked into the cloudburst to let the rain fill up their eyes and mouths and run down their cheeks, and chins, their breasts and bellies, their arms and legs. The people laughed and cheered and danced in the splashing red mud and when they looked at one another, red-painted and naked as the hill-dwelling revenants of Hansenland, they laughed all the longer.

Drop had led to drop to drop in the rain's beginning: likewise it ended, drop by drop. There came a moment in the people's revels when they could see clearly and hear each other's voices over the roar. The deluge slackened, then eased, and it was no more than a light shower. Drop by drop the rain cleared. The last raindrop fell. After the rain it was as quiet as the hush before Creation. Water dripped from the black lozenges of the solar collectors. The clouds ROTECH had made were rained dry. The sun broke through and cast puddles of light across the desert. A double rainbow stood with its feet on the distant hills and its head in heaven. Wisps of vapour ghosted up from the ground.

The rains were over. The people were just people again taking up the lives of men and women. Shamed by their nakedness, they pulled on their saturated, filthy clothes. Then the wonderful thing happened.

"Oh, look!" cried Ruthie Blue Mountain. She pointed to the far horizon. Out there a mystic transformation was taking place: before the amazed eyes of the people of Desolation Road the desert was turning green. The line of alchemy advanced like a breaking wave across the dune fields. Within minutes it was green as far as even Mr. Jericho's eye could see. The clouds dissolved away and the sun shone in the bold blue sky. The people held their breath. Something enormous was about to happen.

As if by divine command the Great Desert exploded into colour. At the touch of the sun behind the rain the dunes unfolded into a pointillist landscape of reds, blues, yellows, delicate whites. The wind stirred the ocean of petals and wafted the perfume of a hundred million blossoms over the town. The people of Desolation Road poured down from their bare stony bluffs into the endless meadows of flowers. Behind them their abandoned town steamed in the afternoon sunshine of two minutes of two.

At the heart of the desert Rael Mandella noticed it had stopped raining. The children peeped out from under his coat like chicks. Beneath their san dais green shoots uncoiled like watchsprings and waved pale stalks in the breeze.

The flowers had pushed their way around the red guitar. Rael Mandella went to the instrument and picked it up. In the sterile place where it had lain, thin white stems struggled for the light.

The red guitar was dead. Its slick plastic skin was blistered and seared, its frets mangled, its strings blackened, its rosewood neck split down the middle. Smoke trickled from its fused internal synthesizers and amplifiers. As Rael Mandella turned the dead thing over in his hands, the strings snapped: precise, terminal noises. There was something clean about the red guitar after its death. It was as if the rain had washed away its sins.

Of the man who had called himself The Hand, once King of Two Worlds, there was not so much as a single scrap of picturecloth torn from a television suit.

"Too much music," whispered Rael Mandella to the red guitar. "You made much too much music this time."

"What's happened to The Hand?" asked Limaal.

"Where's he gone?" asked Taasmin.

"Have the bad doctors got him? asked Arnie Tenebrae.

"Yes, the bad doctors have him," said Rael Mandella.

"Will they push the dead man into him?" asked Johnny Stalin.

"I don't think so," said Rael Mandella, looking to the sky. "And I'll tell you why. Because I think what they have is neither The Hand nor the dead man. I think it is both, that at the very peak of the music they fused together like sand into glass, and now it's like starting out all over again for them."

"Like being born again?" asked Arnie Tenebrae.

"Just like being born again. It was a pity they found him and took him back so soon; we never thanked him for the rain. That was bad of us. I hope he doesn't hold it against us. Well, kids, let's go."

Limaal Mandella tried to drag the red guitar after him to take home as a souvenir, but it was too heavy and his father told him to leave it there at the heart next to the old space-explorer and he went back to the world with empty hands.

ersis Tatterdemalion was married to Ed Gallacelli, Louie Gallacelli and Umberto Gallacelli at ten o'clock on a Sunday morning in the early spring of the year 127. By the power invested in him as town manager, Dominic Frontera declared them polyandrously wed and saw them off on the train to Meridian to honeymoon under the volcanoes. The wedding had been a moving experience for him. The minute the train left he went and asked Meredith Blue Mountain for the hand of drab Ruthie. Meredith Blue Mountain was reluctant. Dominic Frontera confessed his mystic love born in another dimension, his obsessive vision of beauty that tormented him night and day, and burst into tears.

"Ah, the poor man, what can I do to make you happy again?" asked innocent Ruthie, entering the room at the sound of blubbing.

When Dominic Frontera told her she said, "If that's all, of course I will."

The second happily wedded couple in as many days honeymooned among the thousand exquisite and unique villages of China Mountain.

A sign was hung on the door of the B.A.R/Hotel; It read:

CLOSED FOR ONE WEEK: REOPENING SUNDAY 23RD 20 O'CLOCK, PROPS: P. TATRERDEMALION, E., L., & U. GALLACELLI. The sign had been painted by Mikal Margolis. As he painted out his name and replaced it with those of his successful rivals in love, he felt no jealousy, no hatred, only a numb sense of fate closing in around him. He locked the door and dropped the key down a well. Then he went and knocked on Marya Quinsana's door.

Marya Quinsana rapidly grasped the situation.

"Morton, I'm taking on Mikal as an extra hand in the surgery. Right?"

Morton Quinsana said nothing but stormed out in a petulance of slamming doors.

"What was that all about?" asked Mikal Margolis.

"Morton's very attached to me," said Marya Quinsana. "Well, he'll just have to get used to the fact that things have changed a bit now that you're here."

A week later Persis Tatterdemalion returned to Desolation Road with her old, proud name, her three husbands and a full-size professional-quality snooker table made by MacMurdo and Chung of Landhries Road. All hands were set to hauling it from the station to the Bethlehem Ares Railroad/Hotel. Complimentary refreshments were promised and the children, who had danced around pulling ropes and carrying cues, gave a hooray in anticipation of bottomless jugs of clear lemonade. When Persis Tatterdemalion/Gallacelli saw the locks and the sign, she went straight to find Mikal Margolis.

"You don't have to go."

Mikal Margolis was sterilizing a pair of pig castrators. He found it impossible to hold any anger against her, though rationality demanded that he should. It was fate, and being angry at fate was as futile as being angry at the weather.

"I thought it was best that I leave." Mikal Margolis's voice was heavy with congested love. "It wouldn't have worked, we couldn't have gone back to the old days, not knowing that you belonged to someone else, were bearing someone else's child. It won't work again. Take my share of the hotel as a wedding present and I hope it brings you joy. Honestly. One thing though ... tell me, why did you have to do it?"